The disclosed invention is generally directed to air traffic control display systems, and more particularly to an air traffic control display system that automatically offsets overlapping displayed datablocks.
An air traffic control situation display system generally provides a display that is basically a top plan view of aircraft traffic in a fixed geographical region. The displayed information typically includes a symbol that represents an aircraft, a symbol that represents the tracked horizontal path of the aircraft, a symbol that represents the current velocity and direction of the aircraft, and a datablock that contains textual information regarding the aircraft such as aircraft identification, current altitude, and assigned altitude.
When aircraft are close to each other, the respective datablocks may overlap and obscure each other. Current techniques detect overlap conditions and "flip" an overlapping datablock to one of four Cartesian quadrants. This large change in position of a datablock can be distracting, and moreover requires a large amount of processing to process overlaps.